Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sana Clegg, co-founder of Pinkie, located in New York, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Pinkie is here to make puberty less complicated. Pinkie offers the only organic custom-sized pads small enough to fit tweens and teens. Our pads are biodegradable, toxin-free, and eco-friendly. Pinkie consciously focuses on a largely ignored market of those starting puberty, even as young as 8. Our customers are Gen Z, Gen Alpha tweens, and teens looking for a pad made exactly for them! We also connect with Millennial parents who are excited to find a better product for their children than they were offered as young people. Currently, we have a cult following in New York City with many top private schools, specialty stores, and school nurses. We are also hugely popular in the NYC metro area, Greenwich, CT, California, Florida, and Texas. We are also one of the top tween/teen period pad brands on Amazon.com (we have a 4.7/5 rating!) and have over 35K followers on TikTok.
Tell us about yourself
Pinkie was dreamt up by Fiona and Sana: one visit to the local NYC fem care aisle quickly told us that there was a “whitespace” on the fem care shelves – no current period company was actually designing a clean, organic product for young girls. They were large pads mis-marketed as teen pads and were crunchy, plastic, allergen-ridden pads marketed with terrible colors and fonts to young girls. Nothing was speaking to Gen Z and Alpha Gen. We think of ourselves as “40 over 40” working moms who created a product we would use every day for our own children. This integrity is the ethos of our product as we offer a clean, eco-friendly pad for young girls. We want our customers to know that we would offer this to our own daughters – we have five girls between the two of us!
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
The fact that we launched Pinkie in Jan 2020, amidst a pandemic, and within 1.5 years will be in a national retailer in early 2023 is a huge success for us! We did all this while juggling our seven kids, remote schooling, pandemic fears, and general market upheaval.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Time management. As startup entrepreneurs, you have to wear many hats in one day. Going from task to task, problem to problem, and coming up with a solution to anything from a factory snag overseas to a website launch that didn’t go as planned - takes a lot of time management. We work all day, and there are no set hours!
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
Believe in yourself. No one will invest in you if they can sense that you don’t believe in what you can do! Don’t play the blame game. If something falls through the cracks, focus on solving the problem, not who was responsible. It will build more trust and accountability than you think in others on your team! Give yourself credit. If something doesn’t go right at the investor meeting or you forget to pick up a kid from school on time, go easy on yourself. Everyone will be fine if everything doesn’t go exactly according to plan
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.pinkiepads.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pinkiepads/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pinkiepads
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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